A guest and a fish after three days are poison (FRANCE)
Seven days is the length of a guest’s life (MYANMAR)
However, this common human perspective is a complication when it comes to compiling a book such as this one, which aims to be illustrative of proverbial diversity and not comprehensive. It is not possible, in a short selection, to include a proverb as it appears in every country; nor – if reader interest is to be preserved – is it desirable. To illustrate the point, consider these variations on the guest theme – just a few taken from Selwyn Gurney Champion’s huge collection of translated cultural proverbs (see Further Reading):
A fish and a guest go bad on the third day and must be thrown out (BASQUE)
Fish and guests smell at three days old (DANISH)
A guest, like a fish, stinks the third day (DUTCH)
A fish and a guest after three days are poison (ENGLISH)
Guests and fish will get old on the third day (ESTONIAN)
The first day a guest, the second a guest, the third day a calamity (HINDI)
Even a welcome guest becomes a bore on the third day (JAPANESE)
We need only one example to appreciate the point, but that means grasping the nettle and selecting one country to represent all. I have endeavoured to introduce as wide a range of countries as possible, when making such choices. There are 110 (apart from England) listed in Index 5.
All anthologies are made with particular audiences in mind, and selections inevitably change over time. Until as recently as thirty years ago, it would have been normal to find in any proverb collection a predominantly masculine bias, reflecting traditional male-dominated society. Many items, both those native to English and those in translation, would have begun with ‘He who …’ or ‘The man who …’. Times have moved on. I have replaced these with a generic usage, unless there is a genuine male v female contrast involved. A remarkable number of proverbs, in many countries, also reflect unpalatable notions, such as the desirability of beating one’s wife to ensure obedience. And most countries have proverbs which are extremely rude about the people, politics, or religion of their neighbours, especially those with whom they have been at war. I have not included these either, wishing to provide a selection which reinforces the ideals of a more tolerant and inclusive age. The dismissive attitudes are available in the older literature cited in Further Reading, should anyone wish to read them.
From a linguistic point of view, I have adopted a sentence-based notion of proverb, as is usual these days. In earlier times, the notion of a proverbial expression covered a wide range of linguistic features, including idioms, riddles, similes, and everyday phrases. John Bull, hard cheese, Merry England, and I told you so have all been called ‘proverbs’ in one collection or another, in times past. All the proverbs in the present collection are sentences, conveying autonomous units of sense in a succinct form. Many display structural balance, parallelism, rhythmical contrast, and other rhetorical features which add to their memorability and help explain their common use. But it is not obligatory for a proverb to have a tightly controlled linguistic structure. What is important is the insight rather than the form.
It is not easy to define proverbs from the point of view of the kinds of insight they express. They are generalizations which express a remarkable range of functions – conveying advice, warning against consequences, predicting likelihoods, and recommending behaviours (such as diplomacy, courtesy, charity, and kindliness). Many are quite literal, such as An apple a day keeps the doctor away. The more interesting ones operate at two levels of meaning. Whatever we can say about the meaning of Don’t burn your candle at both ends, one thing is certain: we are not really talking about candles.
Proverb collections have used many methods of organization, from alphabetical order to a broad thematic classification. For the present book, I felt the most interesting principle would be to organize the material into semantic fields, as it is in these domains that we are likely to encounter interesting cultural comparisons. Semantic fields are ways of organizing words (more strictly, lexemes: see Index 4) into related groups, such as ‘furniture’, ‘fruit’, and ‘parts of the body’.
There is no single way of grouping words (and thus proverbs) semantically. Within the category of ‘parts of the body’, for example, we can distinguish such contrasts as ‘upper’ v ‘lower’, or ‘head’ v ‘trunk’ v ‘limbs’, or ‘arms’ v ‘legs’, or ‘fingers’ v ‘hands’, and so on. For the present book, I have allowed my depth of detail to be influenced by the nature of the proverbial material. Proverbs talk quite a lot about parts of the body, so I have devoted several sections to them (232–250). By contrast, there are very few proverbs devoted to musical instruments, so I have grouped all types of instrument under a single heading (272).
But how to organize the semantic fields into a sequence? Some collections adopt an arbitrary solution, listing them alphabetically, beginning with ‘Ability’ (or some other A-notion) and ending with such categories as ‘Year’ or ‘Youth’. This has the disadvantage of separating groups that we feel should belong together. Others list proverbs according to the ‘most significant word’ – an approach which is doomed to confusion, faced with the many proverbs that contain words that compete for our attention. Which is the most significant word in The sweeter the perfume, the uglier the flies which gather round the bottle? Plainly, all the main words make a contribution to the sense, and all need to be recognized.
I much prefer an approach which sequences proverb categories on the basis of the semantic relationship between them. I could have started from scratch, and devised a new system, but what is the point, when we already have a system of semantic classification that has been in widespread use for the past 150 years? I am referring to Roget’s Thesaurus, first published in May 1852. Roget has become the standard tool for people who want a thesaurus which organizes words into fields of meaning (as distinct from those thesauruses which list words in alphabetical order along with sets of synonyms and antonyms). I felt the level of generality which Roget used in his approach would be close to that required in a thematic classification of proverbs, so I adopted his logic as a means of sequencing the themes I needed to recognize in this book. Sometimes Roget’s categories were too abstract, and I had to break them down into more specific domains. Sometimes they were too narrow, and I had to group them into broader types. But on the whole the exercise was helpful, and many of my themes are in a one-to-one relationship with Roget’s. The approach may also help those who wish to take Roget in new directions. I have always regretted the absence of proverbs in that work, and Indexes 2 and 3 of the present book can be used to add a proverbial dimension to it.
How then to handle the complexity of such proverbs as The sweeter the perfume, the uglier the flies which gather round the bottle? If one of the constituent words stood out – flies, say – it would be possible to place the proverb into the appropriate category (‘Insects’) and cross-refer all the other words to it. But that would mean five cross references – from sweet, perfume, ugly, gather round, and bottle. Clearly, such a method of classification would flood a book with cross references, and readers would be forever jumping around with their fingers in different pages.
The alternative is to place the proverb into each of the semantic fields that its constituent words belong